Sam Shepard's elusive play A Lie of the Mind is receiving its first major revival since it premiered in 1985 with Harvey Keitel and Geraldine Page. Directed by Ethan Hawke, the production boasts an brilliant ensemble: Keith Carradine, Josh Hamilton, Marin Ireland, Laurie Metcalf, Alessandro Nivola, Maggie Siff, Frank Whaley, and Karen Young (who also performed in the original production). Their passionate performances are vibrantly enhanced by the spellbinding sound design (much of it performed live on stage with "found object" instruments) and Derek McLane's great gallimaufry of a set, packed to the rafters with all sorts of assorted bric-a-brac, like a massive flea market squeezed into a single living room. Over the weekend, we spoke with Hawke about the play, which concerns two midwestern families inexorably bound together by a savage act of domestic violence. Shepard himself describes it "a love ballad, a little legend about love."

So why do this play now? It hasn't really been done in NYC on a scale like this since it premiered, right? Yeah, that's part of why. The truth is that I had always loved this play, and it spoke to me. It's got such an abstract take on reality that seems more naturalistic to me... It's something so far out, that it actually becomes more like how I experience daily life than what most people would call naturalism. I went to an art exhibit that some friends of mine were having, these guys Shelby and Latham Gaines, who had built all these musical instruments out of found objects. And I was really intrigued by what they were doing because to me they all looked like props from a Sam Shepard play. We kind of laughed about that, and before I knew it, we set up a reading of A Lie of the Mind in the gallery, because we thought it would be fun to score the play with these instruments.

And we invited Derek McLane, who had designed Jonathan Marc Sherman's Things We Want, and I kind of was wondering whether he thought we could build a set that could kind of capture the same spirit that these instruments were doing. We all felt kind of blown away by the play again, and by the environment that these musical instruments created. It created a landscape. I love working with The New Group, but the theater is very small—it's not a Broadway stage, and this play is a very big and sprawling epic play, and it needs something to give it scale like that, and I thought that these instruments really did it, which is what led me to the production.

Yeah, the sound was basically spellbinding. And those guys are on stage performing, right? Yeah, live with the play every night.

The set is also just stunning: you walk in and you feel like you've entered the world of the hoarders. What were you going for with the set? I wanted all the stuff in the set to do exactly what the instruments did, which is to not really be what they seem, which is what the play is. The play really takes place in the mind, it takes place in the consciousness, and for me, my mind feels like this giant... like I'm collecting baggage there all the time. Derek and I, we talked about this for about a year, daydreaming about different versions of what this set could be, what it could be like, how we could do it so that it supported the play. And I think what we stumbled on is really special, and I'm incredibly proud to be a part of it. I think it seems like your mind, when you stare at it.

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Allessandro Nivola and Marin Ireland (Monique Carboni)

Had you seen a production of the play before? No, I never have.

Were you interested in looking to at least see it on video? I was. I'm not superstitious about that kind of thing; I thought I could learn a lot from it, but I couldn't find it. They didn't record it for Lincoln Center, and I couldn't find one. I even tried to see the production from the Royal Court in London, because I thought they would have a tape, but they didn't have a tape of it either. I don't know why not.

It's funny, I really identified with that part of the New York Magazine article that mentions how you, Josh and your friends used to watch True West with Makovich and Sinise a lot. I was in the same boat on that, my friends and I used to watch this VHS copy all the time. We had the same VHS copy, just burned it out.

Yeah, now I don't think it's even on DVD, I was looking for it. Yeah, I'm really surprised how hard that thing is to find. I don't think it is on DVD. Although if we all keep talking about it, somebody will finally realize it's a brilliant piece and that they should release it.

Seriously. Now, Sam Shepard has his new play running in New York. Was he part of this process at all, did you touch base with him? When I first spoke to him about doing the play, he told me that it's hard for him to constantly be revisiting the old plays. And he knew it would be a big deal, that this one hadn't been done in a big way for awhile. He said he really wanted to focus on his new writing. But he ended up coming to rehearsal almost every day, and he was a real support for us.

Wow, were you comfortable, and was he comfortable, giving notes and influencing the production? It's always a particular dance the playwright and director have to do together. Whenever the playwright's in the room, there's a danger of being overly-reverential to the material. Even if you're working on Shakespeare, if you really love something, you have to tease it and play with it and criticize it and talk about what it means, and it's hard to talk about what a play means with the author there, because you feel like you shouldn't talk, you should just ask. But just because the playwright wrote something doesn't mean he or she is the best interpreter of the material, in that if you really love something, you have to be able to tease it and study it and figure out what's good about it and what's bad about it, and really talk about it. And sometimes that hard to do with the playwright in the room! For me, he was the last person to direct this play [in NYC]; he's not just the playwright, he's the director, so it was a little nerve-wracking, but we fought our way through it.

You've done more acting than directing. How do you think your experiences as an actor has informed the way you direct? It's informed me entirely. The great thing about Sam Shepard is he's an actor. That's what makes Gary Sinise a great director for this material; I worked on Buried Child with him. Actors understand this material because he writes for actors. I don't come at this all from the vantage point of an intellectual or a dramatist, I come at it as an actor. So I just feel like it's a great skill we can do, if we can hem the poet of the first order, if you can make it visceral and real and perform it, and we can do both, where it's both completely alive and supporting the large themes of the poem it can be powerful.

I especially enjoyed Alessandro Nivola's performance as Jake; I thought he found a really unique balance of menacing and adorable. It's a real trap you can fall into if you try to play a monster. A lot of what Sam writes about are men who don't have any idea how to be a man. And that's why they don't know how to be with women. Jake thinks a leather jacket and dog tags make him man. The play is all about this broken masculinity and fractured self. These are the themes of the play and I think Alessandro manages to be so believable.